Crazy Cailleach

No bus in sight or house around,
just a weary place with cloud coming down,
a gown of white and hail-stone tears,
dropping hard like forgotten years.

And at the corner of a hawthorn’s back
stood an old woman with a smoker’s hack,
hack hack hacking at the cold night air
and in her eyes a menacing glare.

Chain smoking on cheap cigars
with clothing from eccentric bazaars,
her eyes all green and eerie slats,
outlined bold like a luckless cat.

Her hands are hennaed in blue and brown,
gypsy scarves wrapping themselves around,
tentacles of some entrancing witch,
or the unleashed mane of a she-wolf bitch.

She shakes a fist at the ice-bitten sky
and curses God in a soughing sigh,
all the wind wailing within her words
and the prophetic cawing of forlorn birds.

I shiver and quake and turn away
from the strange old woman with the deathly stare.
I would rather walk home in the stormy fray
than face the Cailleach who’s forsaken care.